Bust the Writer's Block

From Courage and Craft: Writing Your Life into Story by Barbara Abercrombie:

To live your own true and precious life, you need to express yourself and make your inner life as important and known as your visible life. Whether you’re published or not, you need to turn the chaos and the glimpses of beauty, the questions and the search for answers, the days and months and years of your life into something meaningful on a page.

Sometimes all those bits and pieces glom together to build up a creative block. Just too much information, too many experiences, feelings, people, relationships overload our writing circuits and plug up the flow.

The good news is that out of this chaos, you can choose to own the mess and design an orderly arrangement that allows creative construction. Busting the block is deconstruction, selecting the elements on which to focus. Incorporate and discard features as you experiment with a piece of writing. If it isn't working--fix it. Don't fear experimentation. No one will penalize you for overproduction and flops. We'd never see Broadway successes if playwrights and producers didn't take repeated risks.

Each day, as you age, fragments of life add to your store of ideas, memories, experiences on which to draw. If you're the type to compartmentalize and pigeon-hole this material, you have a tidy, orderly inner castle. The downside is a tendency to rigidity that needs occasional messing up in order to play the "what if ... " game which nurtures imagination and creativity. At the other end of the continuum, if you can simply absorb what life tosses your way and let it pile up inside, a little housecleaning and organization can help you find the order necessary to make sense and make art.